Aerogels are a fascinating class of high surface-area, mechanically-robust materials with a broad range of both commercial and fundamental scientific applications. Owing to its highly porous mass-fractal nanostructure, amorphous silica aerogel has been used as a capture agent in NASA's cometary-dust retrieval missions, to control disorder in 3He-superfluid phase transitions, in the fabrication of targets for laser inertial confinement fusion, in low-k microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and in Cherenkov nucleonic particle detectors.
In particular, amorphous carbon aerogel has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years owing to its light weight, low cost, electrical conductivity, mechanical strength, and thermal stability. Numerous applications have been explored for this material, including water desalination, electrochemical supercapacitors, and thermal insulation, among others.
Carbon aerogels are furthermore useful for a number of different applications due to their lightweight, conductive, and fairly robust characteristics. In addition, manipulation of a number of their properties, such as pore size, surface area, and density, are well known. However, if pores of a particular orientation are required, for example, to improve mass transport in a particular direction, such a carbon aerogel could not be produced without hard templating, which adds an additional step to the process. Therefore, in order to reduce processing cost, time, and complexity, it would be useful to expand the control of carbon aerogel properties to include pore orientation.
In addition, manipulation of a number of properties of aerogels, and particularly carbon aerogels, such as pore size, surface area, and density, have been performed before and are capable of being reproduced by those skilled in the art. However, currently, there has not been demonstrated any ability to control the orientation of the major pores of a carbon aerogel, for example, to improve mass transport in a particular direction, without hard templating methods, which add one or more additional steps to the aerogel formation process, and are thus time consuming and less efficient.
Furthermore, the current state of the art in the field of target materials for rare isotope production has not taken advantage of the recent advancements in materials science, particularly the tailoring of microstructures and macrostructures for property optimization. Rare isotope beam (RIB) targets are used at accelerator facilities around the world to generate the desired isotope beams for high energy physics experiments and also for rare isotope production used in industrial and medical applications. Typical target assemblies for use in isotope mass separation on-line (ISOL) facilities must be able to withstand extremely high particle flux and extreme operating temperatures.
Due to extreme operating conditions, the typical target lasts only two to four weeks. The down time associated with target replacement using conventional methods, 1-2 weeks, leads to a significant decrease in both isotope production and beam time available for experiments. Therefore, a method for producing such targets quickly, reliably, and inexpensively would confer great benefit to RIB applications.